Need help to improve coding skills (Trying Tic Tac Toe game)

[Tushar Goel]

Hello Everyone, I have completed my core java course and needs to improve my coding and logical skills.. So as suggested by earlier in previous posts i am trying to build Tic-Tac-Toe game.

I am hoping you guys will help me to improve my skills as you all supported me earlier... To start the game i thought below requirement, please let me know what else is required :

requirement:

1 board having 3 rows and 3 columns , 2 players , 1 dot and 1 cross

rule:
1) players needs to wait for its turn till other player tick
2) continous row , column and diagonal entry of same type (dot or cross) is winner
3) if point 2 is not satisfied than match is draw

To check the winner i thought to compare each user entry with the possible position through which match can be won but that includes several if-else statements. Is there any alternative to improve? I also thought to make list of list which stores all the possible combination through which user can win and then compare the position with that but then i also thought it may also not work as for every input i need to compare all the entries...

Any idea how to move forward???

[Campbell Ritchie]

Please search this forum and you will find several threads on the same subject. I think they will be helpful.


Some of them are very long.

[Tushar Goel]

Yeah Thanks Campbell, but i thought if some one review my code than it will help to improve it.. Is there any other way to do that?

[Tony Docherty]

Tushar Goel wrote:Yeah Thanks Campbell, but i thought if some one review my code than it will help to improve it.. Is there any other way to do that?

You could sign up to the Cattle Drive

[Winston Gutkowski]

Tushar Goel wrote:1 board having 3 rows and 3 columns , 2 players , 1 dot and 1 cross

That's a good start, but don't go thinking of these things as Strings, because they're objects, and objects require classes.

At the very least, I can see three: Board, Player and Square, and it's the Square that will contain your "dot" or "cross" (probably depending on which Player filled it).

You might want to read the StringsAreBad page; particularly the example at the end.

HIH

Winston

[Tushar Goel]

Thanks Winston, for Dot and Cross i thought to use ENUM.

So should i start thinking about class and flow of the programe or am i missing something else?

[Winston Gutkowski]

Tushar Goel wrote:Thanks Winston, for Dot and Cross i thought to use ENUM.

Sound pefectly reasonable to me.

So should i start thinking about class and flow of the programe or am i missing something else?

Not that I can see, but do your thinking ON PAPER, not in your IDE or editor. The code itself should simply be a translation of what you already know.

Winston

[Tushar Goel]

but do your thinking ON PAPER

Yeah will do that... I will get back once i make some progress on paper.. Thanks..

[Tushar Goel]

Winston, while thinking about it i thought of 2 things about type of game and it is procedure:

I am starting with basic game for 2 players on different computers/sessions, later i will improved it with computer vs player.

Right now i am creating a console based application in which it receive input between 1 - 9 exactly once from each player.

To control all this operation, i am thinking to use central server which stores all the movement of both players, available squares , assign "O" or "X" whenever new player is connected, check whether player move is valid and check if player is won or game is draw.
I will user socket which receive a signal from particular format and revert on particular value.

at the client side i will validate that user cannot enter same input again.

[Tushar Goel]

I tried to make server version, here is prepCode for the same:

class enum Symbols {
  X, O
}

variables:
1) Declare a variable of type Symbols to store both players symbols
2) Declare a variable to store all the available squares 1 to 9
3) Declare a variable to store all the winning moves. There are 8 such moves through which player can win.
4) Declare a variable to store the state about player. Like one player is use its turn then it should wait till other player is moved
5) Declare a variable to store server socket
6) Declare a variable to store port number
7) Declare a variable to create thread pool of 2 threads one for each player


Methods:

   1) prepareSocket()  {
           set up server
          open a new thread whenever new client is connected and call another method handleRequest and pass client socket to it
       }

 2) handleRequest (client socket variable) {
           
         Declare a variable to store client input stream
         Declare a variable to store client output stream
         Declare a variable to store cllient's moves

         call method assigningSymbolToPlayer whenever new user is connected and pass client output stream variable to it

       while ( squares are not exhausted) {
              if (check if user win) {
                    inform user about its winning
                     break
                }
         read user input and validate it such that no 2 users can select same square. call method userInput method and pass client output stream variable to it
        }
     }

3)  assigningSymbolToPlayer (client output stream variable) {

           if ( symbol list is not null) {
                    find symbol randomly and write it to the client output stream
                     remove that symbol from the symbol list
           }
     }
 

4) checkUserWinnning(user moves list) {

           for ( read all winning combination) {           
                     for (iterate each combination) {
                             for ( iterate all the user moves) {
                                           compare all the moves with the all elements in the combination. if it is existing then user is win else no
                               }
                     }
           } 
    }

5)  readUserInput (client output stream variable) {

           read user input and store it into int variable

          if ( squares list does not contains user input ) {
                    inform client to wait till another player take its turn
                    make entry in the user input list
                    remove particular squares from the available square list
          } else {
                 inform user about invalid input and ask him to reenter
          }
    }

[Tushar Goel]

can any one suggest above prep code are good and i should go ahead of coding or do i need to modify it?